By way of example only, the term “products with reduced longitudinal dimensions” is used to mean pieces of filter material, such as cylinders of activated carbon, cellulose acetate, paper and the like and even pieces of tubes of plastic or plasticized material and including also small spherical products, such as beads which may, in particular, constitute flavouring additives for cigarette tobacco or for the filters themselves.
The above listed products, also referred to as “basic products”, are fed to cigarette manufacturing or making machines and, more specifically, to machines for making composite filters, that is, filters obtained by juxtaposing two or more pieces of filter having different filtering properties and which, when finished, have longitudinal dimensions which are relatively much longer than the individual basic products themselves.
In state-of-the-art tobacco industry machines, which work at very high speeds, these basic products are obtained from elongate elements or rods which are cut during the process cycle in the machines themselves until reaching the reduced longitudinal dimensions the basic products are required to have.
In order to clarify the dimensions involved, it should be considered, purely as an example, without limiting the invention, that these basic products have transversal dimensions ranging from 5 to 8 mm and longitudinal dimensions from 6 to 9 mm, whilst the longitudinal dimensions of the elongate elements or rods are 6 to 15 times those of the basic products.
It is evident that the relatively large longitudinal dimensions of the rods allow easy, particularly precise and stable handling and also allows the rods to be fed at speeds which are not excessively high.
Since the basic products need to be supplied to the manufacturing machines after they have been cut to their final reduced longitudinal dimensions, which is why experts in the trade refer to them as “non-cuttable” products, they give rise to major problems of handling and stability during feeding to the manufacturing machines.
These problems are added to the need to attain feed speeds which are impossible for hitherto known devices for products having such reduced dimensions.
In the prior art, it is also the practice for the elongate elements or rods, which are cut during the process cycle directly in the machines themselves until reaching the reduced longitudinal dimensions of the basic products, to be fed to the manufacturing machines using containers, known as trays, in which the rods are stored in batches according to an ordered orientation and later emptied at the feed stations of the aforementioned manufacturing machines.
Trays known in the current state of the art basically comprise a rear wall, two substantially parallel side walls spaced from each other and a base wall, in such a way as to form an accumulation chamber for accumulating a batch of the rods and subsequently emptying the rods therefrom.
Prior art trays are not adaptable to the requirements of accumulating and emptying the products with reduced longitudinal dimensions ready cut to their reduced longitudinal dimensions and even less are they capable of keeping these products arranged according to their original, ordered and predetermined orientation, especially while they are being emptied.